Help me understand Fenix 5 & HRM strap working together

I purchased the Fenix 5 Sapphire Performer Bundle and love the watch/HRM strap! The data driven nature of this system is really a big motivator for me and helps me hold myself accountable. I've been doing 30 min of cardio (typically elliptical) and most of the time I wear both the watch and HRM strap. Its an old, simple elliptical and its not ANT+ compatible so I'm using the HRM strap mainly to provide the most accurate data i can (and use the damn thing and get value from the kit!)

I've noticed both on the mobile app and web Connect pages that sometimes I'll get duplicate Activities, one from the watch and second from strap. Sometimes when I'm done on the machine I hit the button to stop, then save and sometimes I see a message about its downloading data from the strap, other times not.

What am I doing wrong and/or best practices for wearing the strap and watch together and managing the data? When is the strap appropriate vs. just the watch?

0 JSRUNNER_ over 7 years ago

What you are seeing is very strange!

You would not expect to see a separate activity from the strap

Normally you should wear the strap to get an accurate reading - wrist based HRM is more for 24/7 background tracking of HR and RHR many people find that it becomes very inaccurate for any vigorous activity (although some people do have success).

It is possible I think that if for some reason the HR data hasn't downloaded from the strap and you download it later that the activity will be uploaded twice.

I think I have had that happen once but only with the HRM swim where the data is not read most of the time while swimming and downloads afterwards

0 wojtek_b over 7 years ago

I think I have had that happen once but only with the HRM swim where the data is not read most of the time while swimming and downloads afterwards

The HRM-Tri strap, beeing part of F5 performer bundle (as I googled it) seems to work in the same way as HRM-Swim. However I am using HRM-Swim for more than 2 years and never got a duplicated entry...

0 JSRUNNER_ over 7 years ago

Yes the Tri strap is the same but when I had the issue I had failed to download the HR after my swim

The watch then synced

I then later downloaded the HR data and the activity synced again and was duplicated

Was your activity an exact dupe apart from HR data

0 mcalista over 7 years ago

I'd don't have the HRM-Tri, but you could try waiting a minute or two at the Resume screen, before than progressing to save it. This would let the strap finish downloading